Background
Born in Ulster, the son of a linen merchant, he was educated at Saint Bees School, before wartime service in the Royal Naval Air Service, piloting an observation aircraft from a warship.
Professor of Experimental Medicine
Born in Ulster, the son of a linen merchant, he was educated at Saint Bees School, before wartime service in the Royal Naval Air Service, piloting an observation aircraft from a warship.
Moume Grange, Company Down, Saint Bees School, Cumberland, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
After the war, he read natural sciences at Cambridge University and then went on to study medicine at King"s College Hospital in London. He then began a scientific career in the study of nutrition. He co-authored the long-standard text and reference book The Chemical Composition of Foods in 1940 with Elsie Widdowson, his science co-worker
Their work became known as the basis for modern Western nutritional thinking, with editions in print from 1940 to 2002.
McCance and Widdowson played a leading part in wartime rationing and 1940s government nutrition efforts. In 1936, he delivered the Goulstonian Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on the subject of Medical problems in mineral metabolism.
He was later the director of the Medical Research Council"s infantile malnutrition unit in Kampala, Uganda. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1948 and made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1953.
He died on 5 March 1993.
American Pediatric Society, Association of American Physicians, Swiss Society for Research in Nutrition.
Married Mary Lindsay (MacGregor) in 1922 (died in 1965).